Abstract:
This 5.2ha project extends my preoccupation with the idea of ‘a building without parts.’ If ‘first ideas’ can be the ‘right ideas’ then Neolithic house-forms and cluster-form settlements, the earliest knowledge-sharing architectural formations known, suggest that the University of Auckland’s current strategic development plan for a new multi-disciplinary teaching campus might take the form of a dense, layered, contiguous megaform. Superimposing a range of exceptional educational building projects (largely from Oxbridge and Ivy Leagues universities) onto the Newmarket site suggested the viability of a labyrinthine density. The final project, at the scale of a landform, with scores of specific spaces excavated from its mass, is perforated by dozens of courtyards. Casting a series of aluminium and nylon models of spatial moments at 1:500 and 1:100 formal manipulation and monolithic concrete materialisation was studied. Further tectonic, spatial, daylighting and material refinement was achieved by the digital rendering of a range of places and spaces. This proposition transforms what has been an anti-urban industrial zone into a permeable site bridging Grafton and Newmarket by means of a mixture of academic, public and retail spaces traversed by rail tracks, access roads and pedestrian routes through the ground level and over the roof gardens.